The time frame was what bothered him most. Melissa had left home at 8 P.M. It would have taken her about twenty minutes to get from her house to Oñate Park. She was probably dead by 8:30 P.M. She had to have been at the bottom of the Taos Gorge before 10:30 P.M., when it had started snowing. It was a very tight schedule. It didn’t leave much room for error or second-guessing. Either the killer was a fast thinker or he had planned ahead.
Gil drove into Peñasco, where blue smoke from wood-burning stoves hung in the air. The shadows of the late afternoon made it harder to see the highway.
Down the road a few miles was the turnoff to a small stream that fed Santa Cruz Lake. It was one of his dad’s favorite fishing spots. They would hike in a half mile and make a day of it, casting from one small pool to another. His sister Elena would occasionally come with them, but she would get impatient quickly with all the standing around and being quiet. She would eventually start to climb up the canyon sides and disappear in search of some new path. Once, when Gil was ten, his mother had come with them. Elena, who must have been eight at the time, stayed close to their mother instead of wandering off. They ate leftover empanaditas and drank cold Cokes for lunch. His mother did her embroidery while sitting in her skirt on a boulder. Gil thought that maybe Susan and the girls would like to go there sometime.
His cell phone rang and he pulled over to the side of the road before answering it. It was against the law in the city of Santa Fe to talk on a cell phone while driving. It was still thirty miles to Santa Fe, but rules were rules. He answered, saying, “Hello, this is Detective Montoya.”
“Gil, man, it’s Manny Cordova. I just heard about Melissa Baca. My mom just called and told me. What the hell is going on?” Officer Cordova sounded hollow. His swear words had no strength.
“Manny, I don’t really know anything. The state police are handling it.” Gil hesitated before asking, “Did you know her?”
“We went to high school together and dated a few years ago. Her mom and my mom are, like, best friends. They play bridge together every week. Ron is like my brother. I just can’t believe …”
“What was Melissa like?” Gil asked.
“I don’t know. She was … she was a teacher over at some private school. She lived with her mom and was dating some gringo, some teacher at the school…. I just saw her a few days ago and she was all smiles. I can’t freaking believe this…. You must know something. What are the state cops saying?”
“Manny …”
“Melissa would never commit suicide. Do you think it’s a suicide?” Cordova sounded desperate.
“Manny,” Gil said gently, “I don’t know anything.”
“What does Melissa look like? I mean, can you tell it’s her?”
“I didn’t see the body. But it’s her.”
Gil heard Manny swear softly before he said, “Just call me if you find out anything else. I’m going to call Ron to make sure he and his mom are okay.” They hung up, and Gil got back on the road.
As he crested the hill into Truchas, the sun was setting over the Jemez Mountains. He looked to the east, where the Sangre de Cristos were a deep shade of pink. The Española Valley below was cut by the headlights of cars following the highway out of Santa Fe along the valley floor. By the time Gil reached Santa Fe, it was full dark.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tuesday Night
Maxine Baca sat in the easy chair that her husband, Ernesto, had bought her. It had blue upholstery with white dots and fancy skirt ruffle. Its back was too high, making it uncomfortable to sit in. The armrests were dirty. She smoothed them, hoping it would make them look better. She wanted to vacuum the chair but knew that if she walked to the utility closet she would be stopped by well-wishers—was that what they were called? The living room around her was crowded with people. She heard children’s laughter coming from the kitchen. It was quickly quieted.
She wanted them all gone. She wanted to be locked in her house alone and not let out. She had heard people on television say that having a child die was the worst thing that could happen to you. What was it supposed to feel like when you lost two children and a husband?
She stood up and made it to her bedroom, ignoring everyone who put out a hand to stop her. She slumped in front of her shrine to Daniel and struggled to stay on her knees. Someone was behind her in the doorway, saying something. She ignored him until he went away.
She picked up the picture of Daniel, her oldest. It had been taken at his high-school graduation, a year before he died. She touched the photo. Daniel had borrowed Ernesto’s best tie and they had gone to Dillard’s to get him a new shirt with a collar. She carefully placed the picture back at the feet of the statue of Our Lady. She touched the corners of Daniel’s First Communion picture, which was leaning against a statue of St. Anthony, her patron saint. He had been only six and had been too scared to smile at the camera. Above Daniel’s shrine hung a crucifix. Maxine had dressed Our Lord Jesus in a robe of blue satin, with lace on the sleeves she had sewn by hand. The robe had been her gift to Our Lord for Daniel.
On the table next to two votive candles was a piece of coral. She picked it up. It was pink and jagged. Not much bigger than a pumpkin seed. Her mother had brought the coral when Daniel was born. To ward off mal de ojo. Maxine had put the coral in Daniel’s crib to protect him from the jealous people who would say he was beautiful but give him the devil’s eye.
Ernesto didn’t want the coral in Daniel’s crib, fearing that he might choke on it. But Ernesto didn’t understand. His family was from town and went to the doctor when they were sick. Maxine’s family still lived in the mountains and saw the curandera. The coral had come from the curandera. And Maxine knew that it would protect Daniel.
Maxine, still kneeling, braced herself against the shrine, holding the coral tightly in her hand until she felt it poking into her skin. She heard the people out in the living room talking softly.
The day after Maxine had taken Daniel home from the hospital, Maxine’s mother brought the priest to the house to bless Daniel’s nursery and the piece of coral. The priest had held the coral in his hand, saying something that was hard to understand in Spanish. Or maybe Latin. While the priest prayed, her mother made the sign of the cross with an egg over Daniel three times. Then her mother cracked the egg in a jar. Her mother smiled when she saw that the egg had two yolks. It was a good sign. When the priest was finished, Maxine had made him a meal of enchiladas and green-chile stew. Maxine’s mother warned her not to eat the food, saying that she had to obey the dieta, the time after a woman gives birth when she must not eat chile or tortillas. But Maxine ignored her and ate the food anyway, thinking that it would be rude not to join the priest.
The coral had been the only thing protecting Daniel until he was baptized. He had been born the day after Ash Wednesday, during Lent. There would be no baptisms until after Easter. Maxine’s mother warned her to keep Daniel nearby in case something came for him, because he wouldn’t be protected by Our Lord until after the baptism.
At first, Maxine kept Daniel’s crib in her and Ernesto’s room. She would lie awake, staring at the crib, until she heard Ernesto snoring next to her. After she was sure that Ernesto was asleep, she would get out of bed and quietly take Daniel from his crib. She would lay him down next to her in bed with her arms around him and watch him until morning.
But Ernesto found out what she was doing one night when he reached for her. The next night, she moved both herself and Daniel into the nursery. Daniel never slept in the crib again. Instead, she would rock and nurse him all night in the blue easy chair Ernesto had bought her when he found out that she was pregnant. She eventually had a small bed moved into the room after Daniel got too big for her to hold all night. She didn’t stop nursing him until he was three and a half, when she got pregnant with Ron.
Maxine’s mother had nursed Maxine’s oldest brother until he was five, even after her mother had given birth to Maxine’s sister. There hadn’t been enough milk for bot
h children, so her sister had been weaned after four months. Her brother stopped nursing only after her mother’s milk had dried up when Maxine was born. Her mother had been angry at Maxine and hadn’t put any coral in her crib. The same reason Maxine hadn’t put any coral in Ron’s crib.
But she had put it in Melissa’s.
Maxine set the piece of coral back down on the shrine and picked up Daniel’s baby picture. He was smiling in the picture, his dark eyes almost covered up by his baby fat. It had been taken on his first birthday. For his first-birthday party she had made him a two-layer chocolate cake. She and Ernesto sang as Daniel, with his fat hands flying around, bounced in his high chair and watched the candle burning on the cake. Maxine had been ready to slap Daniel’s hand away from the candle, but he ignored it and instead threw his face into the cake, covering his cheeks and nose with chocolate frosting.
Ron had grabbed for the candle on his first birthday, but Daniel had gone for the cake. Had that been a sign from God? Something she should have paid attention to? Maybe if she had, Daniel would still be alive.
She hadn’t even known that Daniel was taking drugs. She got a phone call one day from the auto shop where Daniel worked. They asked, “Where is he?” Ernesto went looking for him and found Daniel in his mobile home, the needle still in his arm.
It was over just like that. She never had to beg Daniel to stop the drugs or to visit him in a drug center. She hadn’t made any trips to the emergency room to be by his side. She never had to take him to the curandera to be healed or a priest for a blessing.
Everything had been normal. Daniel had come home every night for dinner and called her every morning. She went to his mobile home once a week and cleaned it. She did his laundry every Sunday. She had seen Daniel the day before he died. He’d talked about going into the army. He’d smiled and teased her about the tomatoes she was trying to grow and had mentioned his girlfriend.
They buried Daniel in the family cemetery. She turned forty a month later. She would kneel three times a day in front of the shrine she had to Daniel in her bedroom, praying the rosary for him. She spent the rest of her time at home in her housecoat, cutting out every article she could find about drug abuse. She looked at newspapers only for stories about drugs, throwing them to the floor if there were none. Ernesto would clean up the papers when he got home from work. If Ron came home, he would step on them or kick them into the corner. When she found an article, she would sit at the dining-room table and highlight phrases—distances self from family and seems uninterested in normal routine. But Daniel had been fine. Everything had been fine.
She kept the articles in a shoebox on the dining-room table and would spend hours rereading them. Looking for something she should have noticed so that she could have known, could have saved him. There must have been a sign.
Two years after Daniel died, she woke up one morning with the flu. She couldn’t move when the doctor told her she was pregnant. She sat in his office chair not breathing, until Ernesto whispered in her ear, “A gift from God.”
Melissa Esperanza Baca was born at six pounds four ounces, a month before Maxine’s forty-second birthday.
At her first-birthday party, Melissa threw her face into the cake and ignored the candle.
Maxine was still kneeling in front of the shrine, listening to the people in the living room talk. She picked up the coral again and held it in her hand, turning it over several times, before throwing it as hard as she could against the wall, barely missing the crucifix above her head. The coral shattered and a few splinters flew back at her face.
Lucy sat in the afternoon news meeting with the other editors, not listening. They were crowded into a conference room, with the overflow of people trailing out the door. The assortment of city editors, photos editors, copy editors, graphics editors, and Web editors either sat or stood according towho got to the meeting on time. John Lopez, the managing editor, always sat at the head of the table, whether he was late or not. Dad’s chair.
Lucy was bored and was using her red pen to fill in all the hollow letters in the words Capital Tribune printed at the top of her news budget.
They had already discussed how they were going to handle the Gomez trial—a below-the-fold story on the front page with a single photo. The trial was continuing tomorrow, so it didn’t deserve better play yet. When the verdict was announced in a few days, they’d banner it.
Now they were talking about the bigger story—the woman who had been thrown off the Taos Gorge Bridge. They had found out that her name was Melissa Baca. One of their photographers had a picture of the cops pulling the girl’s body off the bridge. The frame showed her covered body on the stretcher with a hand visible. The assistant photo editor wanted to use the shot.
Lucy knew they would never use a dead-body photo. Northern New Mexico is one big small town. Many of their readers would know Melissa or her family. It would be bad PR for the paper to use the photo. The assistant photo editor argued that the picture represented the scene on the bridge. Besides, he said, it wasn’t any worse than what you saw every night on CNN.
Lucy was surprised that Lopez was even listening. She would have shut up the photo editor long ago. They had run a body shot only once during her three years at the paper. It was of a car crash that had killed a city councillor. The car, with the body in it, had been in the background, with cops cleaning up the accident scene in the foreground. They had thought the body wasn’t that noticeable. The next day, they were besieged by phone calls from outraged readers.
Lopez nodded as the photo editor went on, as if he were really listening. They had been talking about this for five minutes. Lucy was having a hard time hiding her impatience. Why discuss something that was never going to happen?
She interrupted. “So, are we going to have a graphic, maybe a map of where the bridge is? I mean everyone knows where the bridge is, but copy desk might need another design element for the page. Who’s designing page one?”
A copy editor across the room yelled, “Yo,” in an exaggerated Sly Stallone Rambo voice.
“Do you have room for a graphic? How do pages look?” The copy editor handed her the page layout dummies. There was plenty of room on the inside front pages, but the local section was going to be tight.
Lopez said nothing, just looked at her intently. Lucy hoped that she hadn’t just gotten herself in trouble. Not that Lopez would ever say anything. He wasn’t that kind of manager. He was more like Beaver Cleaver’s dad. He didn’t get mad, only deeply disappointed, but his disappointment was something she didn’t want.
“What’s the story with the Baca killing? What do we have?” Lucy asked.
Her boss, City Editor Harold Richards, looked at Lopez, who nodded.
“Melissa Baca was killed sometime yesterday,” Richards said. “She was from Santa Fe. I sent Tommy Martinez to talk to the family. He called an hour ago. He got a little info from some of his sources. Looks like she was twenty-three years old and a seventh-grade teacher at that private school, the Burroway Academy. Her father was a cop. He was one of the officers killed during that shootout seven years ago.” A few of the heads around the table nodded. They remembered. Richards went on, but Lucy stopped listening. She wondered if it meant something that Melissa Baca’s father had been a cop.
Gil drove up to the cinder-block house. Its white paint contrasted with the adobe-brown houses that surrounded it. The neighborhood was middle-class and had few crime problems. Only a minor break-in every few months. The Baca house had a neat mesh-wire fence around it that was covered in ivy turned brown in the winter weather. There had been an attempt at grass in the front yard, but the dirt was taking over. There were cars everywhere. He would have suspected a party if he’d been just a neighbor passing by.
He knocked on the door. It was answered by a woman he didn’t know. He asked for Ron Baca first, but the woman said Ron wasn’t there, adding that she thought he was at work. Gil knew that Kline had given Ron some time off, but Ron might have
picked up a shift. It was what Gil would have done. Get out of the house and get your mind on something—anything—else. Next he asked for Mrs. Baca. He had to show the woman his badge before he was let in. The house was crowded. Children sat on the floor watching Sesame Street on television. The letter of the day was M. Adults sat on couches and chairs along the walls. No one noticed him.
He heard voices in a back bedroom. All the lights in the room were on, even the closet light. Mrs. Baca sat on the bed and she wasn’t alone.
Gil recognized the woman with her—Veronica Cordova, Officer Manny Cordova’s mother. Manny had said that the two women were friends. Their husbands, both police officers, had died in the same shootout seven years ago. Their sons had grown up together and had been in the police academy together. Ron was now Manny’s sergeant.
Mrs. Baca and Mrs. Cordova sat on the bed, holding some blue cloth between them. Gil stepped into the room and they looked up, guiltily. He saw that the cloth was a bath towel.
Veronica Cordova dropped her edge of the towel and spoke first. “We were just looking at Melissa’s things. We found this on the bathroom floor. I thought … I thought if Maxine could just feel something … something that was one of the last things that Melissa used, it would …”
Gil said nothing. Grief made people do strange things. Mrs. Baca was still wearing the same stained blouse. She gripped her half of the towel, wringing it.
Gil sat down next to her on the bed.
“I just came to see how you are. I haven’t learned anything yet,” he said.
The Replacement Child Page 6
